Anne Darwin’s sons became used to a familiar refrain as their “widowed” mother
stood staring out to sea through the bay window of their beachside home in
the months after their father’s disappearance.

“I just wish I knew where John was. He could be anywhere out there,” she would say, with tears welling up in her eyes.

For years Anne Darwin lied to her sons, Anthony and Mark, while watching them grieve for the father they loved

Her eldest son, Mark, who said his world had been “crushed” by his father’s apparent death, did whatever he could to comfort his mother, who “wandered around in a daze”.

As one family friend said: “She was a woman in mourning. If not, she was one of the greatest actresses in the world.”

As we now know, Anne Darwin was the latter. Her astonishing performance convinced her friends, family, and a coroner that her husband was dead while all the while she was helping him hide next door, in a bolt-hole hidden behind a wardrobe.

Driven by greed and a desperation to avoid going into bankruptcy, Darwin doubtless convinced herself that her £250,000 fraud was a “victimless” crime.

But as she contemplates the ruin of her shattered family, Darwin knows she has made wretched victims of not only her sons, who have now disowned her, but of all of her relatives, and of herself.

The prison sentence she is now facing will be nothing compared to the loneliness she must suffer for the rest of her life as the ultimate punishment for her wicked betrayal.

What made her crime so unfathomably callous was not the fact that she got sucked in to her husband’s hare-brained scheme to “do a Reggie Perrin” but that for the following five and a half years, as she watched her sons grieving for the father they loved, she never came close to ending their suffering by telling them the truth.

For the sake of £250,000, she was prepared to see her younger son Anthony, now 29, scour the internet for news of bodies washed up on the shore and listen to him contacting the missing persons register hoping for any scrap of information.

She also made them unwitting accomplices in the scam by transferring properties into their names as part of the couple’s money laundering technique, leaving the sons under suspicion when the truth came out.

Even when John Darwin was suddenly “resurrected” by his appearance at a London police station last December, Anne Darwin, who had emailed her husband hours earlier, continued to make fools of her sons by pretending to be “overcome with emotion”.

If she had been in any doubt before her court case as to her sons’ feelings towards her, their body language as they gave evidence for the prosecution was crystal clear: neither of them could bear to look in her direction for even a second. They had been “betrayed”, they said.

John Darwin, 57, was well known to family and friends for his obsession with money, and in terms of avarice, at least, Anne Darwin was his soul mate. Detectives who listened to her constant lies during interviews nicknamed her Hyacinth Bucket, after the image-obsessed character in the TV sitcom Keeping Up Appearances, who insists her name is pronounced “bouquet”.

As the couple’s property investments failed to provide sufficient rental income and their debts became unmanageable, the Darwins were united in their determination to keep up the appearance of well-to-do landlords. John Darwin refused to give up his cherished £40,000 Range Rover, with personalised number-plates, despite crippling repayments of £639 per month. And the couple refused to sell off their 13 rental properties, despite debts which were rising at £1,700 per month.

“It would have been very easy for them to put the properties up for sale, return the vehicle to the finance company and try to clear the debt,” said Det Ins Andy Greenwood, of Cleveland Police. “They didn’t do that, it was beyond them to do that. It was an image which John and Anne Darwin found difficult to move away from.”

And so the Darwins came up with what Anne later described as their “ridiculous” scheme. After John Darwin had pushed his distinctive red canoe out into the North Sea near his home in Seaton Carew, Hartlepool, on March 21, 2002 his wife picked him up and drove him to Durham railway station so he could lie low for a few weeks.

Anne Darwin went to extraordinary lengths to add authenticity to her “grieving widow” routine, throwing roses into the sea on the anniversary of her husband’s “death” and even keeping one of the blooms on her bedside table.

Six months after Darwin’s disappearance, she issued a statement in which she told of her life “in limbo”.

“People die, have a funeral, they have a headstone, there is something to mark the fact they existed on this earth, but without a body I don’t know how we can mark John’s life,” she said.

“All I want is to bury his body. It would enable me to move on. It’s difficult to grieve without bringing things to a close but as it is I’m in limbo and there’s nothing I can do.”

At the subsequent inquest into his death, she even suggested exactly how he had died, saying he had never managed to perfect the Inuit roll to right himself when his canoe capsized. She also developed the ability to cry at will to add authenticity to her act.

Anne Darwin’s resilience stemmed from her misguided devotion to a man who had cheated on her at least once during their 35-year marriage and who had secretly hoped to set up home in America without her after his “disappearance”.

John Darwin was Anne’s only lover and a man she had known since the age of 11, when they would get the same bus to their separate schools near Hartlepool.

Both had a strict Catholic upbringing and John, a bricklayer’s son, went to St Francis Xavier Grammar School, where he was an average pupil, while Anne, who attended St Joseph’s Convent School, was known for her striking looks and jet black hair which made her a natural choice for her village’s beauty queen in 1970.

Anne, who left school at 16 to become a shorthand typist and secretary, adored the ambitious and driven John Darwin, whom she regarded as her intellectual superior because he studied biology and chemistry at university before going into teaching.

When she discovered he was having an affair a few years after their marriage in 1973, she forgave him because: “I just couldn’t see a life without him.”

Even when he announced he was off to America on his own following his “death”, she did nothing to stop him, despite rightly suspecting he was going to see a woman he had met on the internet, who in the event spurned his advances.

Emails she sent to her husband often contained the phrase “don’t leave me” – her way of telling him she couldn’t manage without him, and her fear of being left on her own was a recurring theme of her defence.

But Anne Darwin was an entirely willing accomplice to the life insurance fraud which allowed the couple to settle their debts and move to Panama, and she displayed an astonishing ability to effortlessly change her story to fit the facts as more and more evidence of her guilt came to light.

When it became clear that she and Darwin had been living together in Panama, she dropped the “back from the dead” story and claimed her husband had turned up “out of the blue” 11 months after his disappearance. When that, too, was exposed as a lie she switched to a story about him forcing her to take part in the scam.

Even during her appearance at Teesside Crown Court, she peppered her evidence with lies, claiming, for example, that her husband had contacted her from phone boxes in the Lake District while he was in hiding, when phone records show no such calls were made.

As one officer on the case put it: “To lie for a week might be difficult. To lie for a year is almost impossible. So to carry this out for five years with members of her family must have taken some doing.”

There will be no happy reunion for the Darwins when they get out of prison. Although she forgave her husband’s affair, she could not forgive him for what was, in her eyes, the ultimate betrayal – getting caught – and Anne Darwin has made it clear she wants nothing more to do with him.